Amsterdam 1585–1790: Emergence, Dominance, and Decline

Abstract

Amsterdam had acquired the reputation as Europe’s dominant insurance centre long before Le Moine de L’Espine’s volume The Commerce of Amsterdam first appeared in 1696. The city’s insurance industry emerged in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, quickly developed into a thriving business, and held onto its prominent position for more than a century. The beginning of the end came in the eighteenth century, and was only relative at first; it did not become abundantly clear until the nineteenth century that Amsterdam had lost its position of leadership, and was in fact reduced to a second-rate insurance market. This story of the emergence, maturity, and eventual decline of a market is inevitably rooted in the interactions of the individuals and groups involved, and the institutional framework which governed their transactions.

That in this City undeniably the most Insurance of all Merchants in the whole of Europe is done, this no one needs to doubt; since not only the Inhabitants but even Foreigners, rather insure here … Because one finds in this city a great number of Underwriters, being … prominent and wealthy Persons, in which all have great trust, and so regarded, that from all over Europe the commissions of Insurance, both on Ships as well as Merchandise, flow here.¹